Adobe, Google bring Photoshop to Chromebooks

Chromebooks are fast, easy to use and secure. They bring the best of the cloud right to your desktop, whether that’s Google Drive, Google+ Photos or Gmail. Today, in partnership with Adobe, we’re welcoming Creative Cloud onto Chromebooks, initially with a streaming version of Photoshop. This will be available first to U.S.-based Adobe education customers with a paid Creative Cloud membership – so the Photoshop you know and love is now on Chrome OS. No muss, no fuss.

This streaming version of Photoshop is designed to run straight from the cloud to your Chromebook. It’s always up-to-date and fully integrated with Google Drive, so there’s no need to download and re-upload files – just save your art directly from Photoshop to the cloud. For IT administrators, it’s easy to manage, with no long client installation and one-click deployment to your team’s Chromebooks.

This is quite interesting – and a direct assault on Windows and OS X. We’ll have to see just how well it works, but if it works well, and a lot of the heavy lifting is done server-side, it might a winner.

Isn’t that the beauty of Free Software? If there’s enough demand, the community will do it–at least, that’s what we’re all told by its advocates. I guess this’ll be a good test, but something tells me the fs advocates and devs are just as much against Chromebooks as they are other proprietary platforms and cloud services.

As for refactoring, Gimp might not need to go to the cloud. Could you not port most of it over to Native Client and just build a web interface around it? A huge chore certainly, but not nearly as much as a client/server model and without the budget overhead that would come with it.

something tells me the fs advocates and devs are just as much against Chromebooks as they are other proprietary platforms and cloud services.

ChromeOS maybe, but ChromiumOS is Free Software, as far as I know. And I’m definitely not against Chromebooks: it was a very cheap way to get a small and light laptop for my needs, running whatever GNU/Linux distribution I feel like. Too bad about the crippled keyboard, though, but I can manage.

Gimp and desktop apps work on a fundamentally different paradigm than Chrome apps; Deskstop apps rely on the system and its libraries, while web apps and ‘local’ apps rely on HTML standards and cloud-driven APIs. And Chrome doesn’t offer library-level integration.

So even though Gimp could use an HTML UI, it would still need to be installed on the system, which cannot be done (normally)

At most, someone could write a new application using canvas and webGL; but it wouldn’t be Gimp, and even if the Gimp team pursued a web version it would still be a completely different codebase. Even then, pretty much every script or extension for Gimp would be broken in the process, so it would be Gimp in name-only.

Alternatively, if Gimp decided to be cloud-based, it would just be SAAS and again, Gimp in name only, and it probably wouldn’t be open (in any usable way, since you’d need some sort of “gimp server”)

The HTML5 canvas backend for GTK+ is kind of like the X11 one in that the display server is remote. You wouldn’t “install” Gimp onto the Chromebook in this case; it would live and run it on a (probably Linux) server and display in a web browser on the Chromebook, much like running a remote X11 program and displaying it on your local X11 server. See https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html

In that case you could, potentially, have *the Gimp* itself running in a browser. “Installation” would be simply the downloading of the web page and the JavaScript code that the C/C++ was compiled down to.

This would be trickier, and would require more low-level work, but would be doable as well.

Gimp and desktop apps work on a fundamentally different paradigm than Chrome apps; Deskstop apps rely on the system and its libraries, while web apps and ‘local’ apps rely on HTML standards and cloud-driven APIs. And Chrome doesn’t offer library-level integration.

So even though Gimp could use an HTML UI, it would still need to be installed on the system, which cannot be done (normally)

At most, someone could write a new application using canvas and webGL; but it wouldn’t be Gimp, and even if the Gimp team pursued a web version it would still be a completely different codebase. Even then, pretty much every script or extension for Gimp would be broken in the process, so it would be Gimp in name-only.

Alternatively, if Gimp decided to be cloud-based, it would just be SAAS and again, Gimp in name only, and it probably wouldn’t be open (in any usable way, since you’d need some sort of “gimp server”)

Gimp along with many Linux native applications will work with Chromebooks or with any browser on any OS.

I would expect that most new apps that don’t fundamentally need a network connection would be written to the offline apis going forward, as I don’t see any advantage in limiting app use to network connections arbitrarily and it’s pretty easy compared to writing a traditional “heavy” application for a more traditional OS. *shrugs*

“Crap! Adobe have developed a service people might find useful, now they have to pay Adobe for it.”

Look, I prefer open source and freely accessible solutions to the alternatives. However, I fail to see how making the tools that people use more available can be a bad thing, let alone be disparaged. What am I missing?

“Worst” case – people like it and pay for it when Adobe asks them for money. Now they rely on Adobe’s tools from a third platform instead of just two.

“Best” case – people like it and adobe sees the opportunities for making their tools available to whoever wants to use them, no matter what platform a user chooses to use them from.

You’re missing the fact that it won’t work without a network connection, or if adobe’s servers are down, like what happened to a couple of my users in the spring, they were locked out of indesign for 24 hours. Who won there? Certainly not my users.

You’re also missing that you don’t save any money with Adobe’s subscription plan, you end up paying more, because you pay every year.

Okay, I’m gonna butt in here now. You see, I don’t quite understand this. You’re complaining that users are “losing” when they can now access Photoshop on a platform they couldn’t before, even if using Photoshop in this manner is completely voluntary and you’re not forced to use it? Would it then be a “win” if they didn’t have access to Photoshop at all? Is it somehow better for the users to not have access to something they want/need than to have access to something they can themselves opt in to use, even if it costs them money?

I can understand not liking always-on stuff and Adobe’s subscription plans and all that, but I think I’m still going to argue that “have access” > “no access at all.” Of course, in a wonderful fantasyland Adobe would just be giving Photoshop out for free and it’d be available natively on every single platform and so on, but this isn’t a fantasyland and Adobe has shown no interest in providing Photoshop for Linux at all and if they hadn’t done it this way I’d hazard a guess that they wouldn’t be providing a native client for ChromeOS, either.

So, you pay more for the subscription service, and it doesn’t work if you have no network connection, and you still can’t see how you lose with Adobe’s service?

With traditional install media (dvd or downloaded installer) Photoshop works across multiple hardware and OS upgrades, you can get it for Mac or PC, and one purchase can continue to function for years.

Even Office365 gives you a real, locally installable download that works regardless if you have a network connection or not. You also pay less per user. IMO, Adobe’s service is just not worth it, regardless if it allows you to run on a Chromebook or not.

With traditional install media (dvd or downloaded installer) Photoshop works across multiple hardware and OS upgrades, you can get it for Mac or PC, and one purchase can continue to function for years.

That’s the whole point: there is no traditional install media at all for ChromeOS and there has never been any. I do not know how to say it any more clearly than I said it already.

That doesn’t make photoshop on the chromebook any less useless or any less expensive. You still have to pay more for the subscription, and you still can’t use it without the network connection.

Oh, and with no local storage, how long for that 5 gigabyte project to come down from the cloud? how long to save your work? Most chromebook hardware is cheap and low end, it’s not really made for heavy duty image processing and editing.

It’s got all the disadvantages of Adobe subscription software on more traditional platforms, and all the disadvantages of the chromebook, so seems like a nonstarter to me.

That doesn’t make photoshop on the chromebook any less useless or any less expensive. You still have to pay more for the subscription, and you still can’t use it without the network connection.

And yet it’s still better than no Photoshop at all. At least those people who have a need for Photoshop on ChromeOS now have something, which is obviously more than nothing.

Oh, and with no local storage, how long for that 5 gigabyte project to come down from the cloud? how long to save your work? Most chromebook hardware is cheap and low end, it’s not really made for heavy duty image processing and editing.

As far as I understood it’s not actually running on local hardware, so the machine’s specs are totally irrelevant. Also, if it’s not running on local machine then it already has access to the files from Creative Cloud without having to download them anywhere, so that’d again be irrelevant. I don’t know if it even allows for saving locally. Uploading local files is the chokepoint, not opening them from CC or saving there.

so seems like a nonstarter to me.

Then it obviously isn’t for you? Is someone forcing you to use it something? I wouldn’t be paying even $5 a year for something like that, but then again, I’m not throwing a hissy fit here and arguing that no one should have access to it if I don’t want it.

Then it obviously isn’t for you? Is someone forcing you to use it something? I wouldn’t be paying even $5 a year for something like that, but then again, I’m not throwing a hissy fit here and arguing that no one should have access to it if I don’t want it.

I’m not throwing a hissy fit either…Who said I was? I made a comment, it’s you who are taking issue with my opinion, not the other way around. I made a general comment, i didn’t respond to anybody else.

That Adobe is able to stream PhotoShop to Chrome books should be an easy way for it to get its feet wet before offering a version of Adobe Creative Suite for Linux. Of course personally, I’ve gotten quite adept at doing everything I need to do with The Gimp. 🙂 I can’t say I’d switch to PhotoShop even if it did suddenly become available on Linux.

No more piracy for you. But still, they should have different prices depending on the country the user lives.

The last time, the version CS5 we are buying, AI costs $700+(forgot the specific cost), Photoshop costs $876, we ended up paying $1500+ for these two apps alone.(Country: Philippines). I don’t know if Adobe would really care about selling products whether if its a developed or a developing country.